Fiona

Woz is the true Tech Jesus

No that would be Stallman. In so many ways, but most importantly by establishing the concept of free software and pushing hard for progressive values. Also by being unpopular with the masses.

This is a completely artificial US problem that has been completely solved in Germany and many other countries by requiring a 1€ deposit to unlock the cart and returning it when you relock it. So, complain to the store for failing to use basic countermeasures.

I’m not saying it’s an easy line to draw because you obviously don’t want to create incentives for bad journalism, but don’t want to make it too high of a bar to get into in the first place. I think you’d need to take things like the number of readers, the factuality of headings and content, the originality and the investigative value into account and be able to at least temporarily cut of bad outlets that spread fake/hate/… while at the same time ensuring that inconvenient truths make it out.

It’s not an easy task, but I feel there is more room to get somewhere useful than with the current model of billionaire-owned media that outdo each other with rage-bait and inaccurate/misleading/falsly balanced/biased reporting…

The honest answer are general fees like they are used for public broadcasters. It’s not a perfect system either and it requires significant effort to keep things neutral, but overall it seems to have the best results if you compare the quality of the outcome.

just imagine the bank would give your payment info to insurance companies for example

That would be a very severe violation of the GDPR and whatever bank-privacy laws are in place. On top of that, which insurance would even be affected by it? I don’t own a car, health insurance comes at non-discriminatory rates here and why would my liability insurance be affected by what I buy? Like: It’s genuinely a non-issue here.

And even if, cash is still a much better option for everything.

Yeah, buying medication is literally the only good use-case for cryptocurrencies, but it still is a valid and important use-case that saves lives!

I’m willing to agree partially: AFAIK the usual classification of the economic system of the SU is “state capitalism” which is indeed distinct from capitalism and socialism and I’m even willing to grant it that, if well executed (in the SU it mostly wasn’t) it has the potential to be better than capitalism in a few aspects.

That said, I agree about the notion that fascism is a form of capitalism: The two are often associated with each other, but at the end of the day quite distinct and orthogoanl systems. Fascism is about having a powerful leader who oppresses the population and the SU very much had that in an almost textbook-manner with Stalin, though I will also acknowledge that there were of course detals in hwo it differed from say Naziism in Germany at the same time.

No it’s more likely that they are an actual leftist. China and Ruzzia are (and the SU was!) fascist hellholes that have nothing to do with socialism and/or communism besides screaming it of the windows all the time.

And people who delude themselves to believe something else are really annoying…

IIRC you essentially just use the hover attribute, it’s pretty straightforward and directly supported in the standard, just rarely used. You can go much wilder than that in fact (click on the components)(source)

Even worse, imagine how woke the books of Karl May (not to be confused with Karl Marx) the most successful German author of all time that were originally published in book form in the 1890s [sic] would be if they came out today:

The foreword to the main trilogy would be so spicy that no modern English translation would include it. Like: He would call out the genocide of the native Americans as such and explicitly assign the full guilt for the decline of their cultures to the whites.

He would have the author-self-insert heroes telling people that use the N-word that “Once they scrape you into the ground, your white-skinned body will become straight and exactly as much a stinking carcass as a negro corpse. You will admit that, and now have the goodness to list your other merits!”

He would have trans coded characters being presented in an unambigously positive light.

And so many more incredibly woke things, like trash talking Christians that don’t respect all other humans and do evil shit…

I don’t like discord, but it is a MASSIVE improvement over all the meta-garbage. Stop using Facebook, instagram, whatsapp and really also twitter first. Discord is the smaller evil compared to those.

Yes forums have their application and are better than discord for a lot of things, but discord is really more a competitor to IRC-chats with a focus on life discussion, rather than long-living content. And it isn’t discords fault if some people completely misuse it as something that it really isn’t trying to be.

Need to use their bloated (web)app.

Which means that it works in a regular browser, which is so much better than a lot of other infrastructure that is increasingly mobile-app only.

Charges for basic functions.

Does it though? It charges for certain emojis and the like, but that is honestly a MUCH more healthy business model than what a lot of other places on the internet are doing. And if you just want to use it as intended, you really aren’t missing out on anything.

I’m really not saying that it is great, but I wonder whether some of the people ranting about this may get signal boosted by meta to distract from their even worse cesspool…

To be fair though: While circumventing that was as easy as logging out, the inability to see things while logged in was kinda stupid and gave people a false perception of privacy. In that setting that change is just a case of being honest.

With the ability to view posts without account largely removed, it’s a bit of a different story, but I have to admit that if it’s public on Xitter, it’s still kinda public, so hiding it still kinda missing the poin.

I call bullshit on this kind of product! This just reminds me too much of the phytoestrogens that ruthless scammers sell on places like Amazon to trick uninformed trans girls into giving them money and believing they receive some medication, when it does nothing whatsoever for them.

The only “phytoestrogens” that actually do something are “phytoestrogens” sold by trusted homebrewers that are labeled that way to avoid seizure at the border.

In order to achieve medical effects, you need proper medication, in this case probably Prolactin. (I’d have to check to make sure, but there are plenty of reports of trans women who succesfully induced lactation medically to feed their kids and had no problem whatsoever after that point.)

The criminal part is that woman-specific options are underconstructed and overpriced compared to men’s clothing. That, and the lack of pockets. Seriously, my heart goes out to anyone who wears clothing targeted to women. I’d be fucking lost without pockets.

Trans girl who sews her own clothing here: I’ve honestly stopped bothering to add pockets to my clothes, because my handbag has REALLY grown on me and takes care of most of the need. Seeing all the guys doing pocket-checks, when I just grep my handbag and have everything in it is almost getting funny at this point. 😊

That said: Fuck the fashion industry, for so many reasons, including for what they did to fashion! Like: Even if we ignored all the human-rights abuses, the trash quality that they produce, the needlessly bad impact on the environment and all of these things, and we really shouldn’t(!!), I just assume most people here have already heard about those, that industry still has no fucking idea of what personal style is and how to support it. It’s a bunch of business-assholes that decide that some thing X is “in” and then you get only that, with the difference between X and the previous X being minute details in the cut, but it still remains the same concept of short, narrow skirt for example.

You are looking for a ankle-length circle-skirt (=flat lying skirt, very wide)? Tough luck, sew it yourself, nobody offers that! You want a long dress with long sleeves? Yeah, that doesn’t exist! (Unless you sew it yourself, like I have, which gave me the most comfortable piece of nightwear I’ve ever owned that I’m even somewhat comfortable to wear in public if I add a visual seperation with some form of belt.) I could go on…

In short: The fashion industry has sold people on the insane idea that jeans with a slightly different cut are a different clothing-style. They are not!

You don’t need quantum computers for that.

Okay, but if I compare my Ingo to Pfister’s Riverside the first thing I notice is this:

I very early on made a very conscious decision that I wouldn’t put much effort into keeping it in pristine condition and would instead allow it to develop some character; if some liquid leaves a stain by embedding itself into the wood, then that would be a part of the tables story. Burnmarks? The same. And not only does that attitude make you much more relaxed, it gives the table character and it has been dealing with it very well. When I wanted to have a power-strip in the middle of the room I just screwed it to the underside of the table and brought the cable with some cable-holders that I nailed into it, to one of its feet and have been extremely happy with that ever since.

Very few people, and I am very much not one of them, would be comfortable taking that kind of approach with a ≈1000€ table and I can assure you that I would be less happy for it.

And yes, I care about the table being reasonably durable (which it is), but it being cheap is a feature beyond price too, and the largely untreated pine from which it is made is something that I like: I really enjoyed the smell that it had when it was still new.

The backup-generator seems to be the one semi-legit use-case that keeps coming up where few people have been able to present a significantly better alternative.